Proposition: Israel has a right to exist.
We often hear the above proposition. There are two ways people like to critique this proposition. The first is by engaging with the region's history; that is, they critique whether the origins of Israel are legitimate, given certain conditions on the ground at the time of the founding and subsequent. But one I often don't see discussed is whether Israel has a right to exist even if it did everything in the right way. That is, when does a country have a right to exist at all?! So, let's dig into the proposition by going through the terms one by one and gradually replacing the proposition with a clearer one.
Let's start with 'Israel'. Israel is the Jewish state. Presumably, this means that most of the people in that state are Jewish, or at least that those people are always in power.
P1: A Jewish state has a right to exist.
Jewish people are an ethnicity, not a religion. We can rewrite it in a more general form.
P2: A Jewish ethnic state has a right to exist => At least one ethnic state has a right to exist.
What is interesting here is to ask, what ethnic states have a right to exist? It could be that the Jews are unique, and they are the only ethnicity that has this right, but this is a strange claim, so let's assume every ethnicity has this right. The Basque As, Syrians, and Native Americans are also ethnicities, so I guess they also have a right to a state.
Okay, that is clearer, but now there is ambiguity about a 'state.' The standard definition is the people governing an organized community. So, we can now rewrite rewrite the statement.
P3: At least one organized community governed by a specific ethnicity has a right to exist.
What stands out here is an 'organized community.' We have two cases about what this means: only Jews or Jews and non-Jews1. The former case sounds fine; Jews govern an organized community of Jews. The latter case sounds odd; Jews have to govern non-Jews. Let's tease out what this means; imagine that this state is 1% Jews, and this 1% must rule the other 99%! If the Jews don't have a high enough fertility rate and don't evict the non-Jews, I guess this entails a non-democratic system. So, if there are non-Jews in this state, then the entailment is that 'Jews have a right to govern non-Jews'.
That also seems more straightforward. Let's make the 'right to exist' part more evident. Presumably, this has two derivative rights.
The right to be created.
The right to continue to exist.
It seems like somebody must have the right to commit violence to enforce these rights. But let's not worry about enforcement for now. Let's focus on what this means:
Imagine that Jews lived nicely sprinkled in every country and had pleasant lives, but there was no Jewish state. In some of these, maybe the Jews are presidents or prime ministers. Nevertheless, some ethnic Jews want to start a Jewish state; it is their wish to start such a state. Unfortunately, no country is willing to give them land. Is the claim that the national community is now committing a rights violation? But this must mean that other countries have an obligation to the Jewish state. But what is the nature of their obligation? I don't see how this obligation can be of any form other than to allow Jews to take some of their land. Maybe it should be that some countries carve out space for them, and the remaining countries have to compensate these countries for their land loss.
P4: At least one organized community governed by a specific ethnicity has a right to be created and has a right to continue to exist.
P4 looks more apparent to me. For a consistency check, do we consider it acceptable anywhere else that a specific ethnicity always be dominant?
I don't have a particular problem with this proposition, but Cyprus is in a similar situation. However, as far as what I see as popular opinions in the European Union or the United States, this is one of the worst kinds of discrimination. There is usually pressure to redefine nationality not in terms of ethnicity or culture but by merely the legal concept. Nobody would accept the existence of a 'British' state where the British referred to an ethnicity. The left-wing today seems explicitly against the idea of any specific group governing, and the right-wing seems to want a particular 'cultural' group to govern (national values). But both oppose the idea of a specific ethnicity having a right to rule other ethnicities!
The discrimination hierarchy
Let's look at some other kinds of discrimination to contrast with what it is that is being asked for here:
One type of discrimination is on motives. That is, you may think somebody only wants to join your country because they wish to spread their own culture or because they want to do some shady activity. Countries can do this kind of filtering by simply asking basic questions. For example, France might want to discriminate by asking 'how long is a baguette?' or some basic language test. Most people think it is legitimate for France to enforce the French language in schools and to teach people about French things. This kind of discrimination is the most accepted, but the measures to achieve it are probably unreliable.
A second kind of discrimination is ideological. It's not clear if people think it's okay to import Christians into a Christian country because they agree with their ideology or because they think that being Christian is a proxy for a probability of integrating, which is a rabbit hole on its own. This kind of discrimination is more controversial. As we have become more secular, it has become more controversial to think the state should be enforcing specific ideas; the exception is usually a kind of enlightenment idealism.
A third kind of discrimination would be one based on ethnicity. Most people seem to be against the idea that you gain preferential treatment in certain nations based on your ethnicity. For example, if Norway had an 'Aryan right of return' today, I assume most people would find that at least distasteful.
This third kind of discrimination seems to be what Israel's right to exist is all about. I suspect then that most Westerners would reject this proposition and hence reject Israel, regardless of how just its origin is. That is, they would probably not support Jews having political power to stop non-Jewish citizens from growing their influence. For example, Israel could halt Arab power from increasing due to their numbers by putting Arabs in one neighborhood and then federalizing its democracy in such a way as to reduce their weight.
Outside of the West, I don't think there would be much objection to the ethnic part, but I suspect they would deny the 'right' part more vehemently. It's doubtful the Japanese would ever acknowledge that they must allow Jews to find a state.
Anarchists/Libertarians should be consistent on this. If you don't think 'states' have a right to exist or that they only have a right to enforce individual property rights or something like that, then clearly, you cannot support Israel. The reason for this is that ethnic states are a subset of states. It is unlikely that people believe that ethnic states are more legitimate than ethnic states. For example, if we have 1000 trying to start a state of random origins, but all equally committed, I suspect their claim should have equal claim to 1000 people trying to start a state if they are all the exact origin. Of course, the common belief is that the homogenous origin group is more likely to request a state.
The alternative view to the idea that an 'ethnic state' where, in a specific geographic region, one ethnicity structurally rules over other ethnicities has a right to exist is natural rights. There are Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East; they have human rights, and they have a right to create states to enforce those rights. But there is no asymmetry in rights; no ethnicity has a right to rule another; in other words, if you believe that a non-Jew being elected president of Israel is not a rights violation, then you don't think that Israel has a right to exist. Of course, you may still believe that a state called 'Israel,' which has Jews and non-Jews, has a right to exist, but not an inherently Jewish state.